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Oftentimes, doing your own home projects can sound like a great idea: you can save money, and you feel more accomplished once you’ve successfully finished. So why not DIY your various home improvement projects? Believe it or not, in some situations choosing to tackle home improvements yourself can actually cost you more money and do damage to your home

In this technological era we live in, you’d be hard-pressed to find industries that don’t rely on tech to do their jobs. Since many of these — such as the military, maritime, and oil and gas fields — take place in a variety of climates and weather conditions, it’s vital that their equipment be safeguarded from any potential damage

On average, a used 20-footer costs anywhere between $1,400 and $2,800, whereas a 40-footer costs $3,500 – $4,500; include the cost of labor to make the material liveable and you can be sitting pretty on a tiny home of your own for around $15,000 — a significant savings over the average $200,000 home price in the United States. What originally started in Hong Kong as a way to provide affordable housing for the overwhelming population, OPods have proven their value; the two-and-a-half meter wide concrete water pipes have been transformed into 9.29-square-meter homes, allowing them to fit into narrow gaps between buildings and be stacked in self-contained low rise modular communities. Since the debut of the OPod prototypes, America has been exploring the possibilities of concrete pipes: in a contest devised to show how making affordable housing can be a reality in an age where homelessness in the United States is a huge problem, Bolivia-born architectural student Sandra Guillen created her Pipe Dream. The 16-feet-long, eight feet in diameter concrete pipe was designed to offer 100 square feet of living space, complete with a shower/toilet room, a collapsible bed, workstation, and even a covered porch.

In Hong Kong, prefabricated steel containers that look like shipping containers are being sold by the dozen amidst the area’s housing crisis. Steel container orders have more than doubled in Hong Kong since 2016 and estimates claim that 40% of these containers are being designed to serve as home residences. With backing from the government, a non-profit called The Hong Kong Council of Social Service plans to build 90 legal container homes within the city’s poorest areas. Now, New York City’s agency has begun to engage in further efforts for affordable housing, including modular housing for mixed-use development.